TRANSLATION MODALITIES: AN INVESTIGATION OF THE TRANSLATED SHORT STORY “DEZ DE DEZEMBRO”

Abstract During the translation process translators adopt linguistic strategies in order to make decisions that help to render a translated text suitable to the target language and culture. The translation modalities proposed by Aubert (105-10) constitute a tool that enables one to identify some of these strategies. In addition, they permit to measure the level of linguistic differentiation between a source text and a target text verifying the distance or the proximity of the target text to the linguistic and cultural issues of the source text. Thus, this paper aims to investigate the translation modalities in the short story “Dez de dezembro” (Saunders 204-38), a translation of the short story “Tenth of December” (Saunders 215-51). For quantifying the translation modalities in the translated text the noun phrases from the source text were selected and their counterparts in the target text were classified and annotated within Notepad++ software. The most recurrent translation modalities in the corpus were Literal Translation and Transposition, categories considered intermediate ones in the rank proposed by Aubert (105-10). Therefore, a relation of equivalence can be established between the target and the source texts.

摘要 在翻译过程中，译者会运用语言策略以作出合理决策，确保译文适配目标语言与文化语境。奥贝尔（Aubert）提出的翻译模态（translation modalities）是一类可用于识别此类策略的分析工具。此外，该工具可量化源文本与目标文本间的语言差异程度，验证目标文本与源文本在语言及文化议题上的亲疏关系。据此，本文旨在分析短篇小说《Dez de dezembro》（桑德斯[Saunders]，204-38）中的翻译模态，该作品实为短篇小说《Tenth of December》（桑德斯[Saunders]，215-51）的译本。为量化译文中的翻译模态，研究选取源文本中的名词短语作为分析对象，对其对应的译文表达进行分类与标注，相关操作均在Notepad++软件中完成。该语料库中出现频次最高的翻译模态为直译（Literal Translation）与移位（Transposition），二者均属于奥贝尔所提层级体系中的中间类别。由此可见，该译文与源文本之间可建立起对等的翻译关系。